With the popularization of the Internet, streaming media services have developed rapidly, and a streaming media service based on a hyper text transfer protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, HTTP for short) is one of them.
In the prior art, content protection is performed on the HTTP streaming media service, so that rights and interests of an owner of streaming media content are protected. Specifically, in an HTTP streaming standard of the 3GPP, the content protection is based on a period. A period corresponds to a duration of a certain content segment, and there is at least one coding representation in the period, and each coding representation includes several media segments. A media segment in each coding representation adopts a same protection manner. The so-called protection manner refers to a protection method adopted for content that needs to be protected and related information applied to the method, for example, the protection method may be an encryption algorithm, and related information of the method is a key corresponding to the encryption algorithm or a means of obtaining a key of the encryption algorithm.
However, during a process of implementing the present invention, the inventors find that: In the prior art, a content protection manner adopted for the HTTP streaming media service is of low flexibility, and fails to meet a diverse requirement when a content provider limits accessing of a streaming media service by a user.